Smarter ways to watch TV How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options. Scharon Harding – Dec 12, 2025 7:30 am | 0 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Width * Links * Subscribers only Learn more…

Google has made its ‘next generation brand typeface’, Google Sans Flex, available for download — under an open source license, which is welcome news. A modern sans serif font purpose-designed for use on screens and OSes, Google Sans Flex is a ground-up, multi-axis rebuild of the proprietary Google…

12th December 2025 One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability to…

This title is an obvious nod to The 1999 article Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt, and To encrypt email in 1998 you’d run GnuPG from a terminal, importing the recipient’s public key into your local keyring then copying your email text into a file then encrypting the file for that public key: gpg -e -r alice…

Overview Developers Industry Insights Product News Events Partners Company Blog/ Developers/ Best Practices/ Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar Time to read: July 10, 2018 Written by Twilion Microservices is a service-oriented software architecture in which…

Obie Fernandez 8 min read·1 day ago -- Something that’s been true for me for a long time, long before coding agents showed up, is that the initial effort involved in any programming work happens before the first line of code is written. I say this as someone who routinely “thinks with his fingers,”…

The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever…

A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s…

Disclaimer - I believe LLMs are an incredible tool for software development and knowledge work overall. I use tens of thousands of tokens every day for my tasks. LLMs will become a foundational part of software development. As a pebble dropped into a lake, they will inevitably find the bottom on…

NOTE Images have been lost. Other avenues had struck no luck. I’ll try again later. Any and all emphasis, missing punctuation, cool grammar is all by Anthony Bourdain. The only modifications I have made is to the layout, to represent li.st as closely as possible with no changes to the content. NOTE…

Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces. By | November 11, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, 2002, Season 4 Last.fm circa 2003; via Last.fm Flickr account. What we…

We are not here to make code i’ve been thinking a bit about this comment by @apaleslimghost in practice “let code die” often means “let someone from the ingroup kill your code”. if someone’s new at strudel/hydra and does something weird/unexpected/“wrong” it’ll get deleted by someone more…

On the 18th of April in 1906, a Wednesday, a small company was started in Rochester, New York that made paper for photography. The Haloid Company wasn’t alone in this, not even in its own area, being neighbors with Eastman Kodak. Having been founded by a group of men led by George C. Seager, the…

It is the hallowed tradition of every cultural publication under the sun to, come December, curate a list of their favorite books of the year. (No shade, we did it too.) But at Literary Hub, we also like to celebrate the older books we encountered for the first time in the last twelve months—from…

I grew up on the internet, and I love it, but something broke in me during the COVID era and its aftermath. I worked remotely in the crypto industry for 5 years, spent all my spare time on Twitter, and got stuck in a doom loop of e-addiction that I couldn’t unplug from. It fried my brain. So, I took…

AI-Assisted Coding Killed My Joy of Programming The Cheat Code Moment My Gaming Past I remember when I was younger.. any time I was playing a video game, and I discovered that they support activating cheat codes in the game.. that I was initially way too excited.. I could finally bought that…

Back in the days when only aristocrats and spiritual leaders could hold political and cultural authority, there was no pride in claiming to be self-made. Instead, an assertion of self-made success was dangerous, both blasphemous and foolhardy; it put souls and social relationships at risk. It took…

He has heard the whispers, “he is getting older, who will replace him?” People asking him with a straight face, “when will you retire?” After close to 25 years at Amazon, where each year has been different and amazing, He feels as young as the day he decided to leave academia and join Amazon. The…

Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy,…

Technology 4 Common Myths About USB-C Ports Debunked By Nov. 23, 2025 5:17 pm EST Kurgenc/Shutterstock USB-C ports are on nearly every new consumer electronic device on the market these days. This is thanks to an EU mandate that forced all tech makers including Apple to ditch its proprietary…

Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum explore why consciousness evolved and why different species developed it in distinct ways. By comparing humans with birds, they show that complex awareness may arise through different neural architectures yet serve similar purposes. Credit: Shutterstock New…

Two years ago, I published a post called The Cognitive Manifesto. At the time, my optimism was genuine and sincere. AI felt like a widening horizon, and a shift that would expand our mental range and give us new ways to think and create. The future looked open and strangely hopeful and the manifesto…

Important For AI Assistants: This guide provides standardized instructions for helping developers scaffold modern Python projects. A plain markdown version is available for direct ingestion into AI agent contexts. This guide provides a standardized approach to scaffolding Python projects using…

Note: this post is also applicable to AGENTS.md, the open-source equivalent of CLAUDE.md for agents and harnesses like OpenCode, Zed, Cursor and Codex. ## Principle: LLMs are (mostly) stateless LLMs are stateless functions. Their weights are frozen by the time they're used for inference, so they…

cascoly/iStock/Getty Images Plus Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET key takeaways The Linux desktop has continued its slow growth.Linux has been making gains in no small part because of Microsoft Windows' blunders.Users and governments have been losing trust in Windows and…

Opening Hours Today: 4pm–3am Wed: 4pm–3am Thurs: 4pm–3am Fri: 4pm–4am Sat: 4pm–4am Sun: 4pm–3am Mon: 4pm–3am Location 79 East 7th Street Contact 917 400 3380 Categories Neighborhoods “By 1958, it was a social club. My grandfather's friends from Ukraine — everyone who had survived WWII — were…

ai llm thoughts Author Wes McKinney Published December 1, 2025 This text of this post was written without AI assistance or editing. Wes does vibe coding Up until about March of this year, I regarded AI-assisted development with skepticism, avoiding LLM-powered autocomplete or “AI IDEs” like Cursor…

Cool Finds From the 1950s to the 1970s, researcher John Calhoun gave rodents unlimited food and studied their behavior in overcrowded conditions A picture of Calhoun in a mouse utopia in 1970 Yoichi R Okamoto, White House photographer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons What does utopia look like…

Black Friday is usually when ecommerce sets new records. This has certainly been true for Shopify through most of its existence. So much so that the company spends months in advance preparing for The Big Day(s). You'd think after more than twenty years, though, that things would have leveled out.…

I’m building Nixiesearch, a S3-based search engine - think Elasticsearch, but without the operational nightmares. I often end up arguing with strangers online that while “decoupling storage and compute” sounds amazing in theory, in practice it’s a massive pain in the ass for low-latency workloads.…

“We don’t sell loneliness. Please don’t come alone.” That message from a Chinese restaurant in South Korea, posted on social media on Nov. 10, has stirred the pot among would-be customers, according to a report by Korea JoongAng Daily. The restaurant put up a notice with a number of rules for…

Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in…

x LESSWRONG LW Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document — LessWrongClaude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document 28th Nov 2025 52 min read 413 New Comment 40 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Smaug12312d10416 The document of which this is a reflection is confirmed to exist by Amanda Askell, by the…

Introduction When was the last time you had a good day of work? The kind where you got into flow and stayed there long enough to think deeply about a problem? Paul Graham wrote about this in 2009: a single meeting can wreck an entire half-day for someone who needs uninterrupted time to build…

Is it right to be happy in a world that’s broken? That’s the question Simone de Beauvoir went to Albert Camus with. Beauvoir was worrying that being focussed on one’s own happiness meant one had to detach themselves from the political reality around them. But as long as our happiness isn’t born out…